I’m amazed that climate.gov hasn’t been taken down yet.
I’ve been saying for years that we’d know when governments were finally getting scared of climate change because we’d see real, very fast moves to install nuclear and, if possible, enhanced geothermal.
Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation makes the parts (if they were made domestically they wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years, when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to charge you a lot more to replace it.
And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C running once the sun has set.
Solar panels won't start degrading in 20 years. Their degrading is linear and starts when you install them. As a very rough guide you can think of it as 1% per year.
The 20-year horizon therefore is not fixed. It's just a round number. There's a point at which it makes sense to add panels (or replace them if you are space constrained.)
Once large numbers of panels start getting replaced you may see them reused in space-available places, or potentially 'reconditioned' to extend their life. Think of it as similar to second-hand cars.
Of course if the price keeps dropping these avenues are less attractive. And if you are space constrained there are already space improvements that may make changing desirable well before 20 years.
Finally, lots of things we use are made elsewhere. And we make things others use. By trading our excess for their excess we create a trading relationship where both sides operate in good faith because it is in their advantage to do so.
The current climate, where the US operates in bad faith, and seems intent on damaging trade relationships, does not encourage other countries to behave well in the future (regardless of the motivations you (project? expect?) from them in the future.
It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much space before even getting into the fact that neither solution can work anywhere at any time.
Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to ignore in this problem we’re facing. When the focus shifts, you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.
Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.
I agree that it’s clear we need more nuclear, but could you explain why solar and wind are dangerous compared to nuclear? Did you mean that all the attention on solar and wind, which can’t be scaled fast enough and must be paired with grid storage, has screwed us when it comes to addressing climate change?
Also, calling solar and wind inefficient isn’t precise enough. By what metric are you judging them to be inefficient?
When I say more dangerous, it’s just a pretty simple calculation - per watt of energy, how many people have been injured/killed when producing energy via a given source. Coal is incredibly dangerous, as is gas by this metric. Nuclear is far and above the safest when calculating in this specific way.
Solar and wind are inefficient, by my definition, because they require large portions of land and cannot run with highly predictable outputs at all times. As a result, you need other solutions to complete the story - larger farms, more farms, large batteries, grids that easily transfer energy long distances, etc.
Nuclear is able to sidestep all of those problems, especially with the relatively recent advent of small modular reactors (SMRs).
We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure carbon deposits).
It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can technically re-use the waste until it only needs to be stored for ~300 years before it decays to "normal" levels. The US doesn't allow you to do that though while say France does.
Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
You can look at it this way.
Or you could can look at it as we reduced radioactive emissions by switching to nuclear from coal.
Everything has trade-offs. It's not like solar has no side-effects.
Years don't matter if climate change puts an end to human civilization.
Likely hundreds of millions to a few billion will die that need not have died, wars will be fought, relocation and migration will be of unprecedented scope and scale, there will be hunger and disease ... but "human civilization" will persist through all of that. Thats not a reason to celebrate, it's just a reason to describe the risks and outcomes accurately.
Hanford has a standing legacy problem of fissile waste from both weapons and energy work.
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
* https://www.icanw.org/hanford_s_dirty_secret_and_it_s_not_56...
Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial amount of granite rock about the planet pools with radon gas on a daily basis until the wind clears it out.
While this is just one of those things that's a risk on the order of a pack a day smoking habit to those who live there, radon is a fission by product from the breakdown of the uranium within the granite.
I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being. And not just a new problem, but one that would last longer than any human civilization has ever lasted.
So, to me, you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands of years is not a unique new problem, for three reasons.
First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human biology requires potassium and natural potassium is radioactive, but it doesn't kill you because the half life is so long.
Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that process produces energy with which to generate electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing this.
And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes doesn't have a half life because it persists forever. Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has turned into a problem.
You stated "[No one] has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem".
I informed you that fissile waste is already a big problem at multiple sites across the planet, several US sites and Russian sites more so than anywhere else, and has been a problem for > 50 years.
You're welcome.
> you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
That's clearly a minor aside .. you ignored the 70+ tonnes of plutonium waste at Hanford.
Billions have been spent dealing with it to date and there's much left to do and spend to clean up that one site.
Don't strawman the issue, it's a large problem and there are tomes on the subject filling shelves.
Humans do need to deal with radioactive waste, this includes the large dams of radioactive waste created as a by product of rare earth and lithium processing.
Perhaps consider that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on what is "meant" by third party forum comments and we are all limited to what is clearly written.
If you are truly concerned by the fate of the earth should it become covered in vast tracts of radioactive waste from some yet to be determined mystery source, then perhaps ask yourself could it be worse than when the earth had numerous surface level natural fission reactors?
It literally isn't. There are two known solutions already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste anyway.
Neither of these things are currently happening for only one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
But that's a self-solving problem, because if you actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against anything, and then you can use either of the known solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the material for a few decades until that happens. The solution to that is what we're already doing at existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent fuel rods at the power plant.
It may also give you some indication of the scale of the problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.
Waste storage is a problem for once climate change is solved. Worst case is local degradation of environment.
A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France. A grid almost-fully powered by renewables for a full year in an industrialized country is yet to be seen. Renewables do work well when combined to fossil fuels, but we need to get off them.
The Republicans programs for electricity is completely insane and renewables is a much better alternative than drilling more fossil fuels. Nuclear is more realistic but the political will is not there unfortunately.
> Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
One can be supportive of Democrats and liberals while not agreeing with one policy point.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 75% of South Australia's electricity generation in 2023, and are expected to provide 100% of state electric power production from 2027.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
- https://reneweconomy.com.au/from-zero-to-100-pct-renewables-...
> Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
This doesn't say anything about how much of Denmark's consumption this covers, only their production
It turns out they import a bunch of their electricity from neighbors
This is a sneaky way to pretend you don't consume fossil fuels
The capital of South Australia is some distance from the border, even further from the Victorian capital (Melbourne) and is weakly linked compared to EU countries.
In South Australia, the current connection to Victoria allows for just 25 per cent of its maximum demand to imported or exported.
“So what that means for South Australia is we have to be a lot more self reliant. And ultimately, South Australia is the test lab for the whole NEM (National Electricity Market,”
The stats are no more misleading than the GP claim this is in response to, namely "A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France."
France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
I don't have a gas powered generator attached to my house. Therefore, if I put a solar panel on my house, then my property would have a 100% renewable supply of electricity
Unfortunately that solar panel wouldn't meet my house's electricity demand, so I would have to import the difference from my local power company. But that doesn't change the fact that on my property the supply is 100% renewable
> Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.
Peak generation hours are almost never aligned with peak demand hours. Unless those battery farms are capable of meeting the supply during their peak demand (very unlikely, I don't think there is any country with this sort of battery capacity built), then they must be re-importing electricity from those same neighbors who are still burning fossil fuels (or have other more consistent power supply like nuclear or hydro)
A breeder reactor plus reprocessing means there is no waste in the first place, and also gives us 100 to 1000 times as much usable uranium.
But it isn’t a competition. I’d be just as happy if things were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of the world is just useful. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
China needs everything it can build and more. It's not much the what but rather where, when and how much that is crucial.
Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.
About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.
(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)
If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.
Your fashion sense is awesome; however, this is engineering, and we need as many options as we can get. There is zero sense in playing favorites here.
In many cases, if you look at the complainants it’s also reasonable to question whether they’re fully honest about their motivations. For example, the big Martha’s Vineyard project was backed by the biggest environmental group in the area but by the opposition were people like commercial fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their property values but do not otherwise live lives full of obvious strong environmentalist views.
I suppose I could use their terminology, though: responsibly sited, balancing conservation priorities, and protecting local communities.
I recall, in my college years, being told how Real Communism hadn’t been tried yet. It seems that Real Communism never did get tried and no matter who tries Communism they never try the good Real variety. After years of watching top environmental organizations repeatedly oppose nuclear power as a whole and renewables often, I think I have to say: Real Environmentalism Hasn’t Been Tried Yet. No True Environmentalist Would Do What These Guys Do.
They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living in the area.
And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.
> They take quite a toll on ... people living in the area.
I can assure you that it's very real, and very harmful on a daily basis.
While people who have a lot to gain from hiding problems with wind turbines are telling the truth.
Isn't that always how it works?
Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have much to gain from public perception & policy?
It’s striking how many wrong things are packed into that paragraph. Science isn’t trustworthy because of the institution, but because it challenges its theories and anyone can review and repeat it. In contrast, the claims being made here started from someone’s belief that they have a financial benefit to not having windmills nearby and work backwards to construct a supporting narrative.
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist.
More accurately, we’re asking for those measurements so anyone else can review them. We’re asking for the methodology so anyone else can review or replicate it. Emotional reactions like yours tend to be a great sign that someone has a strong interest in a particular outcome and humans are notoriously bad at critically evaluating things they want to be true. Scientists are no different, which is why they put so much effort into looking for ways to test their work.
A great similar example are the “electromagnetic hypersensitive” people who claim to have all kinds of health problems caused by wifi or cellular signals. They’ll claim that they’re not being taken seriously because they’re starting backwards from the position that their health issues are caused by EMF and anyone who disagrees is “suppressing” them. The problem isn’t “lying eyes and ears” — their headaches or sleep problems are real - but that they have made a wrong explanation part of their self-identity and are unwilling to reconsider that. Repeated double-blind studies have shown that these people can’t identify EMF at better than chance, and that they’ll report health issues caused by EMF which never existed, and that’s a tragedy because there is a real cause they’d likely be able to find if they were willing to give up on that theory. Many of the wind power opponents are arguing in bad faith trying to make their aesthetic tastes sound scientific but I’m certain that some of these people have real, non-psychosomatic medical issues which are not caused by turbines but could be localized if they put their effort into broader investigations.
(I have no opinion, but find it mildly suspicious given that I happen to sometimes drive through Germany, and the country seems to be currently less insane than, say, US)
This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.
You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?
How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?
I also got a cat (against my will, but gotta take care of her) who wakes me up around 4:30-06:00. :|
I cannot stand the noise pollution. It makes me want to live by the countryside even more.
Personally I liked the sound. But we only had 1, so maybe different with many more. Though never heard the wind farms I've stopped by.
I find both annoying to live with daily.
And it's not like its a problem that couldn't be solved; I like the idea of wind turbines, just not at any cost.
What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.
I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.
Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would raise high-end taxes.
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Insofar as that’s true, it is a direct result of the actions taking thus far this administration, not something they are correcting—and not through fiscal imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic collapse directly (which, because the broad economy drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second order impact.)
Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out.
Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved. Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-defense might deliver better returns.
Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut because it's not about the military. It's a carefully controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation. So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district specific.
Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.
I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the dire state and future of the government’s financial position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for millions of people in this country.
It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.
The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.
However I will point out that the goal of the current "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.
While personally I don't think the deficit number is terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans, not Democrats are responsible for most of it.
But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.
Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading propaganda and lies. “We need to cut stuff because the party I support says so” isn’t proof of a financial apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s the very hysteria lying in which you refer.
Do we need specific evidence about how debt interest works?
Sorry for how snarky this sounds but your response sounds like you don’t believe that the interest on over 33 trillion dollars is a big deal (and it’s growing…)
Please educate me if that’s not how interest or debt works (again I am dead serious here) but it seems disingenuous to claim that some sort of proof is required to point at the debt and say “Ah that’s not a problem unless you PROVE it’s a problem”
Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.
A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).
The people you get your news from are lying to you, trying to get you to sell out your future to their profit.
The economic issues we’re facing right now were created by the current administration installing heavy taxes on imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock with federal spending. This is like declaring that you should save money and doing so by not paying your rent, skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.
If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend to continue, the long-term problems still weren’t catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars, setting a pattern which has continued where we’re told that we have to give up things the public benefit from because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few points higher is too miserable to even consider. That debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive American economy – it’s like the difference in medical concern between noticing that you’re gaining 10 pounds a year versus 10 pounds in the last week.
The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of additional debt in Trump’s first term expire this year and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes even further. It’s mathematically impossible to do that without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as Medicaid or children’s health insurance (CHIP), which is why they’re trying to distract with gross exaggerations of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to manufacture this air of impending disaster so people don’t think there’s a choice. While the choice is no longer as easy going back to Biden’s economic growth, it could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.
Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the financial problem you're worried about. The federal payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive branch doesn't control the budget.
It is no different than a magician doing misdirection. It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.
Much like household debt doesn't matter beyond it's relationship to household income?
Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services. The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay corporate taxes. And so on.
Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's responsibility.
Nothing. Tax the billionaires.
What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive income rate would kill investment and job creation and send us into a depression.
No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.
We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!
Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?
Fuck right off.
> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK
That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.